The Halo number became the first thing she looked at every morning, and then it became the thing she looked at instead of the time.

31. 34. 38.

By forty she had stopped going home on weekends. It hadn’t been a decision. Abby had said, one Friday, Bring more clothes next time, and Lea had brought more clothes, and then on the following Thursday Abby had cleared the top two drawers of the dresser without comment and Lea had found them empty and put her things in them. Her apartment was a place she went to on weeknights now to sleep alone with her hands on top of the duvet. It smelled faintly stale when she opened the door. The plant on the kitchen windowsill was dying and she kept meaning to do something about it.

At Abby’s, the nights were different.

Abby had bought — or had made, Lea was never sure which; there was a lot of Abby’s engineering in it — a set of soft padded cuffs, wrists and ankles, with small grey modules on each that clicked together magnetically. “Sleep cuffs,” she called them. Every night Lea slept at Abby’s, they went on at lights-out: wrists clicked together in front of her, then clipped by a short tether to a ring Abby had installed under the edge of the mattress on Lea’s side. Ankles clicked together too. It was not uncomfortable. She could roll onto her side, curl up, sleep. She could not, under any circumstances, get her hands below her waist.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Abby said, the first night, fastening them. “I don’t. But that’s not why.”

“Why, then.”

“Because I want you to know it every time you move. Even asleep.” She clicked the tether into place and tested it. “Especially asleep.”

And she was right — that was the worst of it, how she was always right. Lea woke in the dark, often, from dreams she could not remember except as heat, and found her hips grinding slowly against the mattress, the shield pressing into the sheets, and her hands straining at the end of their tether toward what they could not reach. And beside her Abby would be awake, sometimes, her face lit by the phone, watching the readout. Once she put the phone down and rolled over and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, “You were saying my name. Put that in tomorrow’s report,” and turned off the lamp, and Lea lay there cuffed in the dark and burned.

Some nights the reports were hard to write. On one of them — a Tuesday, late, after a Sunday in the back room that had left her shaking for a day and a half — she wrote about the table. She hadn’t been on it. She’d only stood at the sink with it behind her in the mirror, twice a week, for a month.

I keep thinking about the table, she wrote. I don’t know why. I don’t want to be on it. It frightens me. I think about it anyway, at work, on the train. I think about what the straps would feel like. I don’t want that. I keep thinking about it.

She sent it at 10:22. Abby replied with a single word — Noted. — and Lea forgot about it.

The guest was on day thirty-nine.

“Daniel’s coming for dinner Saturday,” Abby said on Thursday, over the phone. “My lead investor. He likes to see the founder in her natural habitat. Makes him feel he’s getting his money’s worth.”

“Okay. I’ll stay home.”

“No. You’ll be here.”

Lea was in her office. She shut the door. “Abby, I’m not sitting across a dinner table from your investor while you play with that app. I can’t. I’ll — he’ll see.”

“I agree. That would be a disaster.” A pause. “So you won’t be at the table.”

Lea didn’t understand. Then she did.

“No,” she said.

“You’ll be in the bedroom. Door locked. He’ll never know you exist.” Abby’s voice was mild, reasonable, laying out terms. “Or you’ll be at the table, in the grey skirt, and I’ll have my phone next to my plate the whole evening, and we’ll find out together how well you hold a conversation about Series C dilution. Those are the options. Staying home isn’t one.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so, and because you want me to have said so.” Another pause. “Tell me which.”

Lea sat at her desk with her forehead in her hand for a long time.

“The bedroom,” she whispered.

“Say it properly.”

“I’d like to be in the bedroom while Daniel’s over. Please.”

“Good girl. Come at six. He arrives at seven.”

At six-fifteen she was naked on Abby’s bed and Abby was going through a drawer Lea had not seen opened before.

The cuffs first. Wrists behind her back, buckled to each other, and then a strap from the wrist cuffs down to the ankle cuffs, drawn short, so that she lay on her side with her heels pulled up toward her bound hands and could not straighten. Then the collar — wide, stiff, heavy leather, the first time Abby had ever put one on her — and a short chain from its back ring to a ring at the headboard. Then the shield came off, and Abby held it up where Lea could see it, lying on her side with her head turned on the pillow, and did something to the inside of it — a press, a quarter-turn — and the soft lining with its narrow ridge came away in her hand in one piece. Underneath, in the bare metal of the shield, was a socket Lea had never seen. Round. Notched. Waiting.

“Quick product briefing,” Abby said, in her investor voice, setting the ridge liner on the nightstand. “The sleeve was the prototype. The shield is the product. This—” she lifted the thing from the drawer, and Lea’s stomach dropped — “is what the shield is for.”

It was a thick curved insert, silicone over something hard, the length of a hand, its head swollen and angled forward. Its base flared out into a broad flat plate, and in the center of that plate, rising from it, was a ridge — the same narrow ridge, the same fingertip width, the same haptic at its tip.

“Internal module. It docks into the shield where the liner was. Same ridge on the outside, so nothing changes for your clit.” A faint smile. “Everything changes for the rest of you. Four times the haptic power of the ridge. A pressure grid that maps your whole front wall. And the curve—” she ran a gloved finger along it — “is fitted to you. I’ve had five weeks of data on exactly where you are.”

“You made that. For me.”

“I made it for the market. I fitted it to you.” Abby uncapped the lube. “You won’t live in it. It’s not the plug. It goes in for sessions — when I want something from you that the ridge can’t get — and it comes out after. So you’ll learn to watch for it. Every time I open that drawer, or that cabinet, you’ll wonder.” She leaned in. “Open your legs as far as the strap lets you.”

It went into her cunt slowly, Abby working it in while Lea pressed her face into the pillow and made a noise like tearing cloth. It stretched her wide and filled her completely, its curved head pressing hard up into her front wall, right on her G-spot, so that her vision shivered — and then Abby fitted the shield back over it, and Lea felt the flared base seat into the socket with a soft definite click, and the ridge settled between her lips and onto her clit exactly where it always was. Familiar. Except that now the familiar thing was only the outermost edge of something that went all the way inside her. Abby locked the shield. The plug — the app had ordered it docked at seven that morning, and refused her twice since — stayed where it was. Lea felt stuffed, front and back, sealed in.

“The insert’s on the same app,” Abby said. “Same haptics. More of them. Bigger.”

Then the gag — not the ball this time, but a thick leather panel with a short rubber bit that pressed down her tongue, buckled tight around her head — and then the hood.

Lea saw it in Abby’s hands and started shaking her head, the collar chain rattling.

“Breathe,” Abby said. “Look at it. Nose ports, here, wide open. It laces at the back. Nothing over the airway, ever.” She held it close to Lea’s face so she could see. Black leather, smooth, no eyes, no mouth, only two reinforced holes under the nose. “You’ll be able to hear. Barely. You won’t be able to see anything at all.”

She pulled it on. The world went black and close and smelled of leather and Lea’s own breath, loud in her ears, rushing in and out through the ports. She felt the laces drawn tight at the back of her skull, one cross at a time, the hood shrinking to fit her, pressing her eyelids shut, flattening her ears, until her whole head was enclosed and her own pulse was the loudest thing in the world.

Something was pressed into her bound right hand. The bell. And then — new — something else wrapped around her left wrist and cinched: a band, warm, that she recognized after a moment as one of Abby’s sensors.

“Pulse ox and heart rate,” Abby’s voice said, muffled, through leather. “I’ll have it on my phone at the table. If anything goes wrong, I know before you do. And if you drop the bell, I’ll hear it, and I’ll come, and I’ll tell Daniel I need a minute, and I’ll get you out.” A hand pressed briefly, firmly, on the side of the hood. “But if you drop it, Lea, you’ll have made me leave my investor at my table to come and rescue you. I’d want you to be very sure.”

Then the door. Then the lock — the old-fashioned key kind; Lea heard it turn.

Then nothing.

She would never be able to say how long it was before the doorbell. She heard it as a far-off thud through the hood. Then voices — a man’s, deep and genial; Abby’s, warm and social, a voice Lea had heard her use a hundred times at parties and had never before heard from the other side of a locked door. Laughter. The clink of glasses.

The first pulse from the insert came during what Lea guessed was the first glass of wine.

It was not the polite fingertip-tap of the shield. It was deep and wide and came from inside her, a heavy slow throb deep in her cunt, right against her G-spot, and her whole body bucked against the hogtie and the collar chain snapped tight and she screamed into the gag — a scream that went nowhere, a muffled grunt that the leather swallowed. Then it stopped. She lay there panting through the nose ports, the hood hot and damp on her face. Out in the living room, the man laughed at something.

It came again ten minutes later. Longer. A rolling pattern that built and built inside her while the haptic on her clit came on in counterpoint, tiny precise taps against the swollen center of her, until she was rocking on her side as much as the strap would let her, grinding the shield against nothing, drooling around the bit, the edge rushing up at her blind and enormous in the dark —

Off.

She heard, distinctly, through the wall and the hood, Abby saying, “No, honestly, the margin story is the whole pitch,” and the man saying, “Sure, but walk me through it again.”

Walk me through it again.

Lea lay in the dark with the edge still roaring in her ears, slowly sinking, and listened to Abby laugh and begin, patiently, to walk him through it again.

It was the ordinariness that undid her. She had braced for the vibrations, for the hood, for the hours. She had not braced for this: that out there, twenty feet away, the evening was simply going on. Wine was being poured. A man was asking about gross margin. Abby was explaining it in the warm, slightly amused voice she used at parties — Lea knew every note of it; she’d heard it across a hundred rooms — and the voice did not catch, did not pause, did not carry the faintest trace of the fact that thirty seconds ago its owner had moved her thumb on a phone under the table and driven a woman in the next room to the brink of coming and then left her there, gagged, hogtied, drooling into leather.

He doesn’t know I exist. The thought arrived with perfect lawyerly precision. As far as he is concerned, I am not here. I am not anything. I’m a closed door in a house he’s admiring.

It should have been a relief. It was what she’d chosen; it was the better option; she’d said so herself, please, on the phone. Instead she felt it go through her like cold water — a lonely, sickening drop — and right behind it, closer than she wanted, something worse: a hot, small, shameful jealousy. Of him. Of the man at the table getting the warm voice and the wine and Abby’s face, while Lea got the thumb on the phone.

And then, behind that, worse still — because it was true, and she knew it was true, and it made the leather go hot against her cheeks — the thing she would not have admitted under oath. She’s thinking about me. Under the table. In the middle of a sentence about margin. Every time the insert woke up inside her, it meant that Abby had stopped, for one second, thinking about Daniel’s money, and thought about Lea instead. She was the secret at the table. She was the only thing in the house that Abby was hiding.

Her body, hearing that, clenched hard around the insert, and somewhere a line lifted on a screen beside Abby’s plate, and Lea knew Abby saw it, and knew Abby knew exactly what she’d just been thinking, and the shame of being that legible — of being read, through a wall, from a phone, by the shape of her own pulse — was so total that for a moment she forgot to breathe.

Out at the table, Abby said, “— so the margin improves with every unit after the first ten thousand,” and the insert came back on.

It went on all evening. Lea lost all sense of time in the hood. There was only the dark and the leather and her own roaring breath, and the voices out there going on and on about burn rates and FDA pathways and a restaurant in Lisbon, and the insert waking up deep in her cunt and driving her to the edge and abandoning her there, again, again, with no warning and no rhythm she could learn. Once it held her at the very top for so long — a minute, two, a low steady throb that didn’t build and didn’t stop — that she felt the bell slipping in her sweating fingers and clenched her fist around it so hard her nails cut her palm. She did not drop it. She thought about Abby standing up from the table. Excusing herself. Daniel’s eyebrows. She did not drop it.

At one point, she heard footsteps in the hall, and the bathroom door, and she understood that a stranger was standing ten feet away from her, on the other side of a wall, washing his hands, while she lay hooded and gagged and hogtied and stuffed and dripping on the bed. And the insert — as if Abby knew exactly where he was, and of course she did — came on. Hard. Lea went rigid. She bit down on the bit and made no sound, none at all, while every muscle in her body shook, while the edge broke over her and she held, held, held, while the tap ran and the toilet flushed and the footsteps went away.

It stopped the moment he was back at the table.

When the door finally opened it was nearly midnight. Lea knew because Abby said so, matter-of-fact, unlacing the hood.

“Eleven-fifty. He’s gone.” The hood came away and the bedroom lamp hit Lea’s eyes like a slap and she squeezed them shut, tears running out sideways. The gag came next. Her jaw wouldn’t close. “Fourteen edges. You held the bell through all of them.”

Lea couldn’t speak. She just breathed.

“He asked about you, you know.” Abby was unbuckling the hogtie strap, briskly, rubbing the backs of Lea’s knees as they straightened. “He said, ‘How’s that lawyer friend of yours — Lea?’ He met you at my fortieth.” She unclipped the collar chain from the headboard but left the collar on. “I said you were doing very well. That you’d been very busy. That I’d tell you he said hello.”

She leaned down, close to Lea’s wet, blinking, hood-creased face.

“Hello,” she said. “From Daniel.”

Lea started to cry. Abby let her, and went to get water, and didn’t take off the collar, and in the morning it was still on.

The cheating happened on day forty-four.

Afterward she would argue with herself about whether it counted. She hadn’t touched herself — she couldn’t; that was the point. She had been at her own apartment, alone, on a Tuesday night, and she’d taken one of the decorative cushions off the couch and put it on the floor and knelt astride it, telling herself it was nothing, that the shield made it pointless, that she just needed — something. Pressure. The idea of pressure. And she’d rocked her hips down against the cushion and the shield had pressed up into her, and it had done almost nothing, and she had done it again, harder, and again, faster, gripping the edge of the coffee table, sweat breaking out on her neck, grinding the hard plate down into the cushion and through it into the floor, and the nothing had become not-quite-nothing, a dim faraway pressure on her clit through the lining, and she had chased it, God, she had chased it like a dog, panting, for eleven minutes, and gotten closer, and closer, unbelievably closer —

Her phone rang.

She froze. Her hips stopped. She knelt astride the cushion with her face hot and her hair stuck to her forehead and the phone ringing on the couch behind her, and she knew who it was, and she knew why.

She let it ring out.

It rang again.

She answered it.

“Get up,” Abby said. Her voice was very flat. “Put the cushion back. Get in a cab. Come here. Right now.”

Abby was standing in the kitchen when she arrived, with her laptop open on the island, the same way it had been that very first night. She didn’t say anything. She turned the screen around.

There it was. Eleven minutes. A line climbing in jagged lurches, steeper and steeper, and then — sheer drop — the moment the phone rang.

“Do you know how close you were?”

Lea couldn’t speak.

“I’ll tell you. Another forty seconds. Maybe less.” Abby closed the laptop. “Through the shield. Through a sofa cushion. After forty-four days you were going to make yourself come by humping your furniture like an animal, and you were going to do it without asking me, and you weren’t even going to tell me. You’d have put it in the report, maybe. Tomorrow. If I asked.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.” Abby came around the island. “You’re sorry you got caught, and you’re sorry you didn’t finish, and you’re a little bit sorry you did it. In that order.” She stopped close. “I’m not angry, Lea.”

That was worse. Lea had been braced for angry.

“I’m disappointed. And I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Abby took her by the wrist — not hard — and led her down the hall. Past the bedroom. To the door at the end.

The thumb pad clicked. The lamp in the corner was already on, amber on the oak, the fern in its frame. The eucalyptus. And under the hard white light on its articulated arm, the table, its straps laid open along its edges, waiting, exactly as they had been every Wednesday and every Sunday for six weeks while Lea stood at the sink with her back to it.

“You said I’d be on it eventually,” Lea said. Her voice came out very small.

“I did. And you asked.” Abby let go of her wrist. “Tuesday the fourteenth. Ten twenty-two p.m. You’ve forgotten?”

“I didn’t — I never asked to be—”

Abby took out her phone, found it, and turned the screen toward her. Lea’s own report. Her own words, in her own phrasing, the dashes she always used.

I keep thinking about the table. … I think about what the straps would feel like. … I keep thinking about it.

“That’s not asking,” Lea said. “I said I didn’t want it. It says — look, it says I don’t want that—”

“It says it twice,” Abby agreed. “And it says I keep thinking about it three times. You’re a lawyer. Which one’s the argument and which one’s the objection?”

Lea opened her mouth. Shut it. She read it again — standing naked in the doorway of the back room, with the table under its hard white light behind Abby’s shoulder — and the words would not hold still. She had written them. She remembered writing them. She remembered meaning I’m afraid. But she could see, now, how they read, and she could no longer quite reach the version of herself who’d been sure what she meant. Had she been asking? Some part of her? Was that why she’d written it down at all, when Abby only asked for the times she wanted to come — why she’d volunteered it, unprompted, at 10:22, on a Tuesday?

“I don’t know what I meant,” she said.

“I do,” said Abby. “Strip.”

The punishment was not what Lea had imagined, on the cab ride over, in the dark of the back seat with her pulse thundering. She had imagined pain. Abby didn’t hurt her. Abby had her climb onto the table and lie back on the cool leather, and then she strapped her down, and she did every single strap.

It took a long time. That was part of it. Ankles first, the fleece-lined leather buckled snug and checked with two fingers. Then knees. Then Abby pressed the pedal and the foot of the table split and the two padded halves swung slowly apart on their hinges, carrying Lea’s legs with them, wider, wider, until her thighs trembled at the joint and the cool air of the room lay directly on the shield, and Abby buckled her thighs down too. The wide strap across her waist, cinched until her hips were pinned flat. Wrists, out to the sides on padded arm boards. Elbows. Upper arms. Last, the wide padded band across her forehead, drawn down until she could no longer lift or turn her head and could see only the ceiling and the hard white light.

Lea pulled, once, everywhere at once. Nothing moved. Not an inch. Not anywhere. She had been cuffed before, chained, spread on Abby’s bed — but there had always been slack, a few inches of give, a way to writhe. Here there was none. The table held her the way a mold holds what’s poured into it.

A guest room in a good hotel. A doctor. And now, finally, a patient.

Abby rolled the steel tray to the side of the table, set her laptop on it, and opened it.

“I’m resetting the count,” she said.

Lea’s eyes went to her as far as they could.

“Forty-four days. It goes back to zero. Tomorrow it’ll say one.” Abby’s fingers moved on the keys. “And I want you to watch me do it.”

She tilted the screen down toward Lea’s face. On it was the Halo dashboard, the big white number, 44. Abby’s cursor sat over it.

“No,” Lea said. “Abby. No, please, you can’t—”

“I can.”

“Please. Please, I’ll do anything, I’ll — I won’t ever, I swear, I won’t ever do it again, don’t make me start over, please, please don’t make me start—”

She heard herself. She heard what she was saying. She was begging — strapped naked to a table, spread, unable to move so much as her head, crying — not to be let out. She was begging to keep the time she had already been locked. Begging to not lose her place in it. As if the forty-four days were something that belonged to her. As if they were the only thing that did.

Abby heard it too. Her eyes, over the laptop, went very dark.

“Say that again,” she said.

“Don’t make me start over.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” Lea choked on it. “Because I did them for you. All of them. Every one. They’re yours.”

Abby looked at her for a long time.

Then she closed the laptop without touching the number, and set it on the tray.

“I won’t reset it,” she said. “That’s what you want most, so that’s what you keep. But you don’t get to come anywhere near sixty without paying for forty-four.” She stood. “Fourteen days. Added to whatever I’d decided. You don’t know what I’d decided, so you won’t know what it is now. Just that it’s further.”

Lea shut her eyes. Tears ran sideways out of them into her hair. She could not turn her head to hide it.

“And tonight,” Abby said, opening the glass-fronted cabinet, “you’re going to learn what forty seconds feels like.”

The gag went in first — the leather panel with the bit, buckled under the forehead band. Then the hood, laced tight, the world gone black, the hard white light reduced to a faint warmth on the leather over her eyes. Abby’s fingers pried open Lea’s strapped right fist and pressed the bell into it; the sensor band cinched onto her left wrist beside the strap. Then the shield came off, and the insert went in, and the shield went back over it, and Lea felt something heavy laid against the outside of the plate — the wand, from the weight and the cord — and a second strap drawn across her hips over it, buckled down to the table on either side, so that its head was pressed flat and immovable against the shield right over her clit.

“The wand’s on a timer,” Abby said, close to the hood. “The insert’s on the app. I’ll be in the kitchen. Doing email.” A pause. “You wanted a cushion. Here’s a cushion that can’t be interrupted by a phone call. Except it’ll stop at forty seconds every time. Every single time. I’ve programmed it.”

The door closed with its soft, sealed sound.

It started.

Through the shield the wand was blunted, diffuse, an enormous muffled roar that soaked through the metal into her — never enough, never directly — and deep in her cunt the insert woke and throbbed against her G-spot in counterpoint, and together they built her, fast, up and up, nothing to brace against, no Abby to beg, only the black hood and her own breath and the machines. On the bed she could have writhed. Here she couldn’t even do that. Every part of her that wanted to move — hips, thighs, back, head — met leather and stopped, and all of that wanting had nowhere to go but inward. She came up on the edge with a choked grunt into the gag —

And it held her. Forty seconds. She counted them, without wanting to, in her pounding head. Forty seconds of right there, of the wave cresting and cresting and refusing to break, her whole body straining rigid against straps that did not give a millimetre — and on forty, both of them cut out together. Dead silence. The wave hanging. Receding.

Then, after a minute — less — they started again.

Abby came in once, maybe an hour in. Lea heard the door and the footsteps and felt a hand on the side of the hood, checking, and two fingers on her wrist beside the sensor, and then the hand pressed on the wand, just once, pushing it harder into the plate — and went away. The door shut. The machines started again.

She did not drop the bell. She thought about it — near the end she thought about almost nothing else, the little brass ball slick in her strapped fist — and she did not drop it, and she could not afterward have said whether that was courage or the opposite of it.

When the hood came off, it was past two. The hard white light had been switched off; only the amber lamp was on, and the fern, and Abby’s face above her, unreadable. Abby unlocked nothing. She took out the insert. She unbuckled the wand and the gag. Then the straps, one by one, the same order in reverse, checking each wrist and ankle for color. She had to help Lea off the table. Lea’s legs would not hold her. Abby walked her down the hall to the bedroom with an arm around her waist, the way you’d walk a patient, and put her in the bed, and clicked the sleep cuffs on, and turned off the lamp.

“Forty-four,” she said in the dark. “Plus fourteen. Say thank you.”

Lea’s jaw ached. Her voice was a ruin.

“Thank you.”

She meant it. That was the part she would not be able to explain to anyone, ever, and she understood, lying cuffed in the dark with her pulse hammering behind the metal, that she was never going to try.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 44.
Entry by: A.M.

Infraction: unsupervised frottage against soft furnishing, 11 min 14 s. Interrupted by call at est. 40 s from climax. Not reported by subject. Would not have been reported.

Response: first use of table. Full restraint. Threatened count reset. She begged to keep her days — unprompted, specific, sincere. “They’re yours.” Recorded. Will play it back to her at a moment of my choosing.

+14 days, undisclosed target. Not knowing is worse for her than any number.

Daniel dinner (day 39) review: fourteen edges, bell held, including one with D. ten feet away in the hall. Her HR peaked not during stimulation but afterward, unhooded, when I told her he’d asked after her by name. Note: she is more afraid of being forgotten than of being seen. Both are useful.

Table: used her own report of day 36 (“I keep thinking about the table”). She wrote it as fear. Read back to her as a request, she could not tell the difference. She said “I don’t know what I meant.” She will remember tonight as something she asked for. Keep the report.

Resting baseline now 71. Body no longer returns to pre-trial floor. As predicted.

She thanked me tonight and meant it. Telemetry confirms.

The next day there was a new line in the Halo app. A small grey caption beneath the big white number, in a font so small she almost missed it.

Baseline: 71 bpm resting. Previous: 64.

She read it on the train. It took her a moment to understand. Her resting heart rate — the one Abby had called boring, that first night on the terrace — had risen seven beats in six weeks, and stayed there. Her body had stopped coming down. It had found a new floor, higher up, and was living on it.

Until close is where you live, Abby had said.

Lea put her phone in her bag. The train braked under the river. The plate shifted against her, and she held the pole, and she did not hold her breath. She’d stopped bothering. There was nothing to brace against anymore. It was just where she lived.